Technical, constructive, fun.

Back in 2010 I finally finished University. For me, University for some reason wasn’t a choice, but a last resort. After struggling to get through my GCSEs with a head cold, and then fumbling through college (or sixth form as it seems to be called now in the UK) I had a choice to make. I could either try to find a job, or go onto Job Seekers Allowance (JSA).

I got into Teesside University through the clearing process, and just as I had struggled to get into college by having to re-sit my GCSE Maths, I got onto the ladder of University with a Higher National Diploma (HND) in Computing, Software Development. When I finally got around to finishing it, some 4 years later than intended, I was determined to get a degree, only to be told by the University lecturers that they felt I wasn’t a capable C Programmer, even though the undergraduate degree module and course was aimed at people with no prior knowledge.

After Teesside University lost and re-found my grades, I got into another University where I rode the programming and networking train through my Bachelor of Science degree through to Masters of Science.

Sometimes you shouldn’t listen to lecturers, and often the path isn’t easy.

So in 2010 I was meant to publish my dissertation in an article in a journal. If I’m honest with myself, I had anxiety issues, and sometimes I still do. I never published the article and I was pretty burnt out from University. Suffering mostly from what I now recognise as ‘imposter syndrome’. My work was also downgraded because I didn’t discuss the mathematics behind my findings so well, you can perhaps see why I struggled and I blamed myself for that.

You’ll likely have used similar techniques to this in tools such as Nessus, however perhaps not to this extent. There are some good findings in this report, and some details omitted, such as the discovery that the behaviour of promiscuous mode network adapters are changed if you’re running a VMWare Virtual Machine – I still have the stats and evidence of that one somewhere. I was advised not to release that information into my dissertation at the time, VMWare wouldn’t have been happy, apparently.

If you’re interested in some coding (it’s in there too), Z-Statistics of network packets, and also comparisons between Microsoft Windows, Linux and OSX and identifying them on an enterprise network, then you’re in for a treat.